It’s common to get to the other side of a major event and wonder a bit about what we are supposed to do now. Easter is kind of like that. There’s all this build up and then…what now? What are we supposed to do in light of this incredible news that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day? As we wrap up our journey through Luke’s Passion Narrative, we are going to be talking about that very thing because that’s the very thing we find Jesus pointing the disciples to in the final conversation Luke records them having. Let’s take a look together at the “now what” of Easter.
Too Good Not to Share (Luke 24:36-53)
April 12, 2026
Can I meddle just a bit this morning? Most college basketball observers figured that Duke was going to be the National Champion this season. But they didn’t. They actually wound up only making it to the Elite Eight. This is because UConn–who, of course, wound up getting smashed by Michigan in the championship this past Monday—had one of the most incredible, last-second, upset wins of the season. With just four seconds to go, Duke had a 2-point lead and the ball. All they had to do was inbounds the ball and hold it. But instead, a freshman UConn player intercepted an attempted pass at halfcourt. With time quickly ticking away, he frantically passed it to a teammate closer to the basket, but unable to do anything, he threw it back, and from near the halfcourt line, with under a second to go, this freshman threw up a prayer. The whole thing felt like one of those slow-motion moments at the climax of a sports movie even though, again, the whole thing played out in less than five seconds. With just four-tenths of a second remaining on the clock, the ball swished through the hoop and the game was essentially over.
Duke fans, I’m sorry to bring that up, but to be fair, my Jayhawks lost on a last-second layup, State lost on a last second jumper, and UNC gave up a 19-point lead to lose in overtime. So see, we’re all in this together. Anyway, I warned you I was going to meddle a bit. What I’m getting at here is this: We’re still talking about that near-halfcourt shot two weeks later. The next day, everybody was talking about it. It was on every highlight reel in the country. The news was just too good to ignore, especially if you are a UConn fan or not a Duke fan. Sometimes news really is that good—so good you can’t keep it to yourself.
Well, this morning we are wrapping up our Easter-focused series, A Story of Sacrifice. For the last six weeks we have been working our way through Luke’s story of Jesus’ final week leading up to His arrest, trial, crucifixion, and, ultimately, resurrection. The goal of this journey hasn’t been to explore any particular topic so much as it has been to just let Luke share with us what the Holy Spirit prompted him to say. Along the way, we have seen some things we don’t often consider when approaching this story. For starters, when Jesus came to Jerusalem, He came for judgment. He came to proclaim judgment against the ungodliness and unrighteousness of the city, but rather than leaving the city to itself to face God’s wrath, Jesus very intentionally stepped into that judgment in our place. He proclaimed God’s wrath, but then took that wrath so that we didn’t have to. Then He rose from the dead, defeating forever the powers of sin and death. This is the greatest story ever told. It is a story of sacrifice of the first order.
Now we’re on the other side of Easter. What now? Do you ever wonder that? Maybe that’s just a preacher thing. So often we get to Easter itself, and then the next week feels…empty. That’s not to say today’s not still a great day—it is. But with Easter, there’s all the build up, all the hype, all the crowds. And once it’s gone…we don’t really know what to do next. The same is true in a lot of different situations where the thing you have been waiting for finally arrives and now you don’t know what to do next. Fortunately, Luke’s Gospel doesn’t just end cold with the resurrection like Mark’s Gospel does. He takes us a little bit further, and even includes some of the final conversation Jesus had with His disciples on that incredible day. This last word gives us a clear sense of what our answer to the “now what” question should be. Let’s take a look at this together this morning.
If you have your copy of the Scriptures handy, join me in Luke one last time. Go all the way to the end of Luke’s story to Luke 24:36. Let’s make sure we all know where we were last time, because Luke here picks up right where we left off. After the news about Jesus had spread (and after He made an appearance to Mary Magdalene, as John reports), Jesus next showed up on the road out of Jerusalem to a suburb called Emmaus, walking with a couple of His disciples who did not recognize Him. He played dumb while they told Him everything that had been going on. Then He turned the tables on them by explaining what it all meant from the Scriptures. They were still clueless until He broke bread before them. Just as they clued in, He vanished. Realizing that Jesus really was alive and that the women had been right all along, the pair ran the seven miles back to Jerusalem as fast as they could to tell the others what they had seen and heard. And as they were telling their story, Jesus showed up again. “As they were saying these things, he himself stood in their midst.”
Now, imagine for just a minute that you were one of the disciples in that room. We know from what Luke writes in Acts that there were as many as 120 in the group who gathered in that room. Not all of them were there—for instance, Thomas was famously missing—but I’ll bet most of them were. As Cleopas and the other disciple were telling their story, all attention was fixed on them. There was not a sound in the room other than the sound of their voices as they rushed to get their story out as quickly as they could. Everyone needed to hear this. And then Jesus showed up.
You have to wonder where in the room He showed up. Did He walk through the door? John tells us it was locked. Did He just apparate in like a wizard from Harry Potter, simply appearing out of thin air? We don’t know. What we do know is that He appeared to the group and greeted them. “He said to them, ‘Peace to you!’” There is a temptation to make that some kind of formal greeting and get all theological with the phrase, but this was a pretty standard greeting in that day. This was the equivalent of Jesus’ showing up and saying, “Hey guys!” And you have to know that every time He did that in these initial appearances He had to laugh to Himself hysterically (okay, mostly to Himself, but maybe not entirely), because every time He did it, they would all freak out. And why not? He had been dead. They knew He had been dead. Some of them had seen Him dead. And now He was alive. They didn’t have a category for that. And what do you do when you encounter something you don’t have a category for? You freak out.
“As they were saying these things, he himself stood in their midst. He said to them, ‘Peace to you!’ But they were startled and terrified and thought they were seeing a ghost.” If you’ve ever wondered why we believe Jesus rose from the dead and that His followers weren’t just making the whole thing up to do a power play on the religious rulers of the Jews, stories like this are why. If they had made the whole thing up, they wouldn’t have freaked out when they saw Him. None of them expected Him to be alive again after He died. So, whenever they saw Him, their first thought was not, “Great! Jesus is back!” It was consistently, “Ahh! A ghost!”
In any event, Jesus could have said a lot of things in response to their fear. For instance, He could have said, “Hey guys, chill out. It really is me.” Or maybe, “Man, you guys are really surprised to see me!” Instead, we get, “Why are you troubled?” Why are you guys freaking out? Now, come on, that’s funny. He knew exactly why they were “troubled,” and not just because He was Jesus. He doesn’t string them along too far, though. “‘Why are you troubled?’ he asked them. ‘And why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself! Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you can see I have.’”
In other words, the disciples’ initial reaction to seeing Jesus alive with their own eyes was not to rejoice, but to doubt. They didn’t believe the truth that was literally standing in front of their faces looking at them. They needed help—the very help we talked about last week. And, like we talked about last week, Jesus gave it to them. “Having said this, he showed them his hands and feet.” He proved it was really Him. He was really right there, standing in front of them. He wasn’t a ghost. Ghosts don’t have flesh and bones. Ghosts also don’t eat. He took care of that objection next. “But while they were still amazed and in disbelief because of their joy, he asked them, ‘Do you have anything here to eat?’ So they gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence.” This was all about establishing beyond any shadow of doubt in their minds that He really was alive.
The truth, though, is that this shouldn’t have been hard for them to grasp. I mean, yes, what happened to Jesus had never before happened in the whole history of the world, but it’s not like He had left them unprepared for it. He had told them numerous times what was going to happen when they arrived in Jerusalem. He was going to be betrayed, arrested, tried, and put to death, but it was all going to be okay because on the third day He was going to rise again. Here they were on the third day, and everything had happened just as He had said it would. If they had really believed His words, they would have been there at the tomb counting down to sunrise so they could see the show.
But there’s more. They shouldn’t have been unprepared for this because the Scriptures themselves laid out what was going to happen. Jesus reminds the whole group of what He had done for the two disciples on the road to Emmaus whose story He had just interrupted. What happened to Him was all foretold in the Law and Prophets—that is, the Old Testament. Verse 44 now: “He told them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” There’s more of that help we talked about last time.
So, what has all of this been about? Why is Jesus doing all of this with the disciples? Why not move on to other things? Because He had to make sure they were all solid on the matter at hand before they were going to be able to do anything else. So He gave them proofs: The proof of Himself standing before them, and the proof of the Scriptures. If we are going to talk about the “now what” that comes after Easter, this is a pretty important part of the answer. We have to be sure that we are solid on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and the Gospel as a whole before we are going to be able to go on to anything else.
Both of these proofs matter for us just like they did for the disciples. On the second proof, we have that in spades. For starters, we have the Old Testament just like they did. They simply called those “the Scriptures,” but they were the same Scriptures as what we read in our Old Testament today. This is actually something worth thinking about more than we usually do. We give most of our time and attention today to the New Testament authors, and that’s not without due warrant. They tell us directly about Jesus. They present the Gospel in clear, simple fashion. They tell us what it looks like to live like Jesus. That should be the first place we turn when we go to the Scriptures. But Jesus and the disciples didn’t have any of that. None of the believers in the first century did. Now, by the latter half of the first century most of the documents and letters that make up the New Testament were in circulation among the churches, but when they thought about the Scriptures, the Old Testament was what they had in mind. When they used the Scriptures to make the case for Jesus, they used the Old Testament and only the Old Testament. If they could do that, we can too. That just requires us to spend a little more time with them so that we know them a little better. Thankfully, though, we also have the New Testament which gives us everything I just mentioned and more. That’s huge in terms of helping us make a case for the resurrection and the Gospel.
On that second line of proof Jesus gave the disciples—Himself standing in front of them—we’re not so fortunate as they were. We don’t have Jesus’ body around anymore to point to. We don’t know with certainty where His tomb was, and even then, it’s being empty—which is kind of the point—would just be written off by a skeptic as the result of ancient graverobbery. But this isn’t nearly as big a deal as it seems like it could be. For starters, the disciples did have Jesus standing in front of them to give them all the proof they needed and they still didn’t believe it at first. Jesus’ showing up today in bodily form and declaring Himself Messiah would be written off by hardened skeptics as little more than a magic trick or delusional state. If they don’t believe it now, they still wouldn’t believe it then. They would find some way to continue to justify their unbelief.
Beyond that, though, we don’t need Jesus’ body. Using a mode of scientific reasoning that is used by scientists studying events or phenomena of the ancient past called “inference to the best explanation”—the very same mode of reasoning that Charles Darwin used in developing his theories on human origins—we can examine the clearly established historical facts surrounding Jesus’ death (which no credible scholar denies) and what supposedly happened on the third day and make an overwhelmingly compelling case that it is what happened on the third day; that the best explanation of those facts is that Jesus in fact rose from the dead. In other words, we can be as certain as we possibly can be that Jesus really rose from the dead, that the Gospel is true. Now, “as certain as we can be” and certain aren’t quite the same thing, but that’s okay. We have a higher degree of certainty about the reality of the resurrection of Jesus than we do about a whole lot of other historical events that no one denies to be factual. In other words, your faith is reasonable. Your faith in the resurrection is reasonable, and the resurrection makes all the rest of your faith reasonable because if Jesus rose from the dead, then game on.
But still, what are we supposed to do with that? Well, look at the next thing Jesus said to them in v. 46 now. “He also said to them, ‘This is what is written: The Messiah would suffer and rise from the dead the third day.” That’s the basic formula of the Gospel, and the thing we just established. But there’s more: “…and repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in his name to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”
This idea about their being witnesses to these things has a twofold meaning here. The first one is obvious. They were literally witnesses to the resurrected Jesus. He was standing there in front of them. They had checked out His body and seen that it was real. They had watched Him eat something, demonstrating that He was in fact still fully human. But there’s another sense in which they were witnesses. If someone commits a crime and worries about witnesses to his actions, he’s not really worried merely about people seeing what he’s done, is he? He’s worried about their seeing and telling someone else. The whole idea of someone’s being a witness is not just that they have seen whatever it is, but that they can bear witness about what they have seen to someone else.
The disciples had been witnesses to the resurrected Jesus. Now, Jesus was calling them to be witnesses. He was calling them to bear witness. They were to go and tell people about what they had seen and heard and experienced. They were to tell them that Jesus died and rose just as the Scriptures proclaimed He would do. They were to proclaim that because He died and rose, the forgiveness of sins was available to all those who were willing to come to Him with repentant hearts to receive the grace He had won for us on the cross where He paid the price for our sins. They were to proclaim that He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree that we might die to sins and live for righteousness. And they were to do all of this because this was the Gospel. This was the good news. It was the best news ever. The news of the resurrection was not something they could keep to themselves. Well, the same thing is still true for us. The news of the resurrection is not something we can keep to ourselves.
If you are a follower of Jesus, if you are someone who has accepted that He really did rise from the dead, this is your “now what.” The news of the resurrection is not something you can keep to yourself. You need to tell somebody else about it. You need to tell somebody else about what you have seen and heard. You need to tell them about your experience with Jesus. You need to tell them about how He has changed your life, and how He continues to impact your life as your living Savior. You need to tell everybody, in fact. All of us do. The news of the resurrection is not something we can keep to ourselves.
And if you’re sitting there thinking, “I don’t know. That’s a pretty scary idea. I’m really not comfortable talking about my faith. What if someone asks me something I don’t know?” Let me say that I understand. I’ve been there. Just because I’m a preacher doesn’t mean I have all this stuff down pat, especially as introverted as I am. But here’s the thing: If someone asks you something you don’t know, do you know what you tell them? You say, “I don’t know. That’s a good question. I’d love to help you find the answer.” And then you come and ask me, and I’ll make sure you have what you need to respond well. That’s literally my job as your pastor according to Paul.
And if you’re not comfortable talking about your faith, why aren’t you? Is it because you don’t really know what you believe? I get that. Lots of folks are there. The way to handle that is to figure it out. Do the work. Read the books. Have the conversations with me or with Pastor Dave. Learn what you believe and why you believe it. And if that sounds like a lot of work, my counsel is: don’t be lazy. It’s good to do hard things. That builds us up into the kind of people we want to be anyway. Doing this particular hard thing will build you up into the kind of person God made you to be. That seems like a pretty good outcome. Or maybe you’re not comfortable talking about it because you’re not sure you really have it. That’s okay. Just be honest about that and let’s talk about where you are and how we can work together to see you move forward in your faith journey. Just don’t settle for where you are. That’s the one thing you can’t do once you know about the resurrected Christ. The news of the resurrection is not something you can keep to yourself.
And if the idea still seems scary, Jesus said something else here that might help. Check this out in v. 49 now. “And look, I am sending you what my Father promised. As for you, stay in the city until you are empowered from on high.” What’s this? This is Jesus telling them—and us—that we won’t be alone in these efforts. He never intended for us to be. As He told them on the way to the Garden of Gethsemane, He was returning to the Father so that the two of them could send the Spirit who would be (and is now) our helper to do all that the Father and Son have called and commanded us to do. In fact, not only did Jesus promise to send this Helper, but He told them not to do anything until the Helper arrived. The news of the resurrection is not something you can keep to yourself, and Jesus will make sure that you have all the resources you need to spread the word.
Okay, but if we’re being totally honest, that’s kind of an intimidating prospect. I mean, most people don’t even remotely feel called to go somewhere around the world to proclaim the Gospel. Does this mean we’re not being faithful to this call? Not at all! Yes, some people are called to go far to proclaim God’s kingdom to those who have never heard. And I suspect more are called than actually go. Some just need help hearing and obeying that call. But a whole lot more aren’t called to do that. They—we—are called to advance the Gospel right where we are. News flash: There are plenty of people right within our local sphere of influence who have never really heard the Gospel. Some of them were even raised in the church. How many people—maybe some of the folks in this room were or even are included in this group—heard the Gospel, but it never made it from their head to their heart. The reasons for this are many, and if we were in their shoes, it probably wouldn’t have made the jump for us either. But all this really means is that they need to hear and experience the Gospel, the power of the resurrected Jesus, for real for the first time. And it just may be that you are perfectly positioned to be able to do that. If you’ve received the news, have received Christ, in your own life, how could you not? The news of the resurrection is not something you can keep to yourself.
So then, here’s what you need to do in light of all of this. If you haven’t ever really heard and embraced the Gospel, you need to fix that. Jesus died for you to free you from your sins, and then He rose from the dead to defeat even death such that in Him you can have the life you’ve always wanted. If you are someone who has accepted this, then you need to tell someone else about it. The news of the resurrection is not something you can keep to yourself; not if you’ve really heard it. As for how you do this, yes, doing a formal Gospel presentation is certainly a way, but it’s not the only one. Your efforts to share the Gospel can start with something as simple as an invitation to church. This is something I’m personally doing all the time. I wouldn’t tell you to do it if I wasn’t. Sometimes a person will tell me no a lot before they finally visit, but once they do, the community this church has tends to draw them in. In other words, you can invite someone to church with confidence because you know that you’ve got people here who will make that invitation pay off.
Invite a friend or neighbor or family member or even a stranger you think probably hasn’t really embraced the Gospel to come to church with you. Invite them to meet you at the Gathering Place on Wednesday (and then make sure to wait at the door for them and stick with them the whole evening). Do the same thing for a Sunday morning. Build a relationship with them. Invest in their life in both the good and the hard moments so that you are there for the times they are naturally inclined toward spiritual topics that will open the door to your sharing what you believe about them. Offer to pray for them—or even with them—when they are struggling with one thing or another. Be as creative as you can. Be as winsome as you can. Do whatever it takes to share the news of the resurrection. The news of the resurrection is not something you can keep to yourself. So don’t. Share it.
The Nexus 